Toshiba Claims Bit-Patterned Drive Breakthrough

CWmike writes "Toshiba will detail a breakthrough in data storage later Wednesday that it says paves the way for hard drives with vastly higher capacity than today, reports Martyn WIlliams. The breakthrough has been made in the research of bit-patterned media, a magnetic storage technology that is being developed for future hard disk drives. Bit-patterned media breaks up the recording surface into numerous magnetic bits, each consisting of a few magnetic grains. Under a microscope, the magnetic bits look like thousands of tiny spheres crammed next to each another. Data is stored on these magnetic bits: One magnetic bit can hold one bit of data. Prototypes of the media have been made before but Toshiba says its engineers have, for the first time, succeeded in producing a media sample in which the magnetic bits are organized into a pattern of rows."

Re:oh really?

[Abstrackt]

Bit-patterned media breaks up the recording surface into numerous magnetic bits, each consisting of a few magnetic grains. Under a microscope, the magnetic bits look like thousands of tiny spheres crammed next to each another. Data is stored on these magnetic bits: One magnetic bit can hold one bit of data.

Just like every other hard drive! Hooray for the future!

"Toshiba says its engineers have, for the first time, succeeded in producing a media sample in which the magnetic bits are organized into a pattern of rows."

Just like every other hard drive! Oh, wait...

Re:I'm not a hardware guy

[atmtarzy]

From what I read in the article, it looks like Toshiba's reduced the number of magnetic grains per bit from a few hundred down to just a few. Otherwise it appears everything is the same.

I read TFA

[Megahard]

They claim that this will increase the density 5x.

Re:One magnetic bit can hold one bit of data...

[Lunix Nutcase]

Except that current HDDs use a wider area of surface to write the data too as compared to this.

Very, very small isolated domains

[Kupfernigk]

It's really quite obvious. Current drives have continuous media. Put very simply, this tends to "smear out" the magnetic field, because there is no magnetic break between the N and S poles of one bit, and the poles of another. This has two bad effects: unreliable bits (location in space), and the possibility that bits will simply flip as the head passes over them. By isolating very, very small domains in a structured way, with nonmagnetic regions between them, the problems are avoided since the bits, being isolated from one another, will not be subject to domain creep or interference.

how this differs

[Anonymous Coward]

here is a link which might explain things more clearly

http://www.bentham.org/nanotec/samples/nanotec1-1/Piramanayagam.pdf

Re:Very, very small isolated domains

[mattack2]

I think you said exactly the opposite of what you meant to say.

If the boundaries between the bits are more "discreet", then they are more hidden.

If the boundaries between the bits are more "discrete", then they are more distinct, and presumably will interfere with each other less often.

                                                      -Your friendly neighborhood Grammar Nazi

Quick explanation

[AdmiralXyz]

For those who are too lazy to RTFA, here's a very simplified explanation of what's going on:

In current drives a bunch of rather randomly sized and shaped magnetic grains are basically "glued" to the surface of the drive, and the collective orientation of a certain number of those grains (called a domain) determines whether you've got a 1 or a 0.

In this, instead of dumping grains onto the surface, they're using lithography to carve very precise grains onto the disk, which can be made much smaller and more identical in shape, than the random ones allowing for vastly higher storage densities. It's basically applying the same technology used to make computer chips to make hard drives. The technology has actually existed for a while, but the cost per bit to pattern lithograph a hard drive has always been huge; I guess Toshiba has figured out how to bring it under control. Cool stuff.

Re:Bit = Binary Digit

[DeKO]

For the uniformed: with today's technology, a 1:1 correlation between data bits and magnetic "bits" is nearly impossible. We have to interleave data bits with clock bits, so we are able to count runs of equal bits. So the data bits are encoded on this interleaved stream of data and clock/sync bits before it is actually stored in the physical medium. If the bit-patterned layout doubles as a clock/sync mechanism we can store only the data bits (with error correcting codes too, of course).

Re:Very, very small isolated domains

[mattack2]

His comment made sense to me; discrete as in separated.

He said DISCREET, not DISCRETE.

Re:Very, very small isolated domains

[mattack2]

I "called him out" because he was saying almost exactly THE OPPOSITE of what he meant to say. I wasn't picking on a simple typo or common misusage ("it's" when "its" is proper), but a time when the wrong word choice could cause confusion for the reader.

Re:I read TFA

[Superdarion]

uh... 2.5tb/541gb = 4.62 (technically rounded up to 5)

Learn to use the calculator, dude.